LUCERNE

Through the meandering afternoon park  

That trickles by the river and boatyards

Down to the lovely, illustrious lake,

Passing statues, jetties and picnickers,

Sleepers, children’s playgrounds and a juggler,

We amble along shaded sylvan paths

Until, after a warm but well-spent hour,

We reach a white mansion with green shutters.

The Wagner House at Tribschen stands august,

Raised on a landscaped mound overlooking

A wooden boathouse, shrubs and cypresses

With red seats of readers and view-finders.

A single white sailboat drifts lazily

Through gaps in the tall trees by the lakeside,

Barely rippling the tranquil blue water, 

As it floats from one frame to another,

Foregrounding the green forests and white clouds

Which crest the blue Alps, clear in the distance,

As sunlight catches the meadow flowers

Sloping down away from the flawless lawn.

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll here -

And an idyllic place, it truly is,   

But then we remember what a fascist  

The old, long gone genius was at heart…

Before we leave, we decide, however,  

To trust - rather than the artist - the art.

We depart by way of an outbuilding

That houses an ultra-modern toilet,

All clean stainless steel with push button seat

And whirlpool flush. On the wall, a small hole

Opens a chute, above which a graphic

Of a syringe minds us that the word ‘idyll’

Means idealized, unsustainable…

Then we slowly walk back out of this world

To the world of inconvenient fact,

But with our digital pictures intact.

(2014)

This came out of our first visit to Switzerland. England has become a country cursed by graffiti and litter, with my hometown of Leicester an increasingly bad example. Zurich and Lucerne, by way of contrast, were spotless but, even there, amidst so much apparent perfection, little flaws would appear at the edge of your memory and vision…

KEIFER (1945-)

Born into a blitzed Fatherland,

He grows with a restless intellect full

Of Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche,

Agitating at the edges of national amnesia,

Sieg heiling Hitler and the Holocaust

Out of the bunker and back into the landscape;

Reclaiming and reminding Germany to remember.

‘We don’t why we are here and we don’t know

Where we go’ becomes his mantra;

The cosmic cycle of construction and destruction

His method and obsession, his mania.

His colours are black, brown and grey,

With a flash of silver and gold, a splash of red;

His materials ash, concrete, paint, straw and lead.

His process is damp, rust and decay

With the petrified flowers sprouting

Through the wreckage of his work

Echoing Nature’s ongoing reclamation.

In France, he raises up ruins

Over some two hundred acres

Like some twisted Portmeirion;

A concentration of towers and tunnels

Barracks and ovens and batteries;

Strip-lit interiors with only occasional

Daylight leaking through cracks

Into corners and on to rubble.

Elsewhere, in another French studio

Housed in a massive warehouse,

The artist directs his artisans

With their power-tools and hydraulics

In the setting out of his installations

And their disassembling and reassembling;

Lifting the vast paintings on rollers

Aboard trucks and planes and ships

And into the galleries of the world.

And Keifer hacks away at the pictures,

Sometimes stacking them like the strata

Of his own personal geology,

Saving and cataloguing every last scrap

In his great library of debris and leftovers,

With his hoards of multifarious crap

In yards of industrial containers,

Waiting for him to work his alchemy.

Nothing ever finished –

Until it is sold and turned into gold.

(2015)

I'd never heard of Keifer until I saw a TV documentary which fascinated me sufficiently to jot down some notes at the time. It was, however, the best part of a year before the notes became the basis for this poem - another of the group about artists which all arrived within a few days in what had been an otherwise rather fallow year for poetry. 

The photo is of one of his stacks of  past canvases - alluded to in Verse 4 - which were installed as a work in themselves for an exhibition. Also evident are the 'petrified flowers' mentioned  at the end of Verse 2.

MAGRITTE (1898-1967)

 Heads are shrouded like funeral urns,

A bowl of fruit becomes monumental,

Set in stone, as does a Stonehenge chair.

And pictures live within pictures, you see,

Anchored here by a cannonball

Or by a tuba which burns over there;

Another shatters as glass into shards of sky

And the sky recurs and recurs,

In an eyeball, in a tree, in a doorway, in a bird.

A woman in a forest, stately on horseback,

Moves through the lines, becomes one with a tree.

Seashores too, are everywhere -

On one lies a mermaid in reverse

And, out at sea, a schooner grows out of sea.

And you see the apple, the fish, the blood and the pipe.

 Over there it is raining umbrellas;

Here, men in bowler hats pour down.

You think this might be a joke –

An illusion or gimmick, perhaps,

But somehow you seem to know

This is not a hype.

Owls and doves grow as plants

On scenic mountain tops by a lake.

Trees of a single, gigantic leaf bloom,

A bird is turning into a flying bouquet

And a boulder floats beneath a sickle moon.

Look here: the artist is painting his reflection

Reversed in a wonderland looking glass

And photographing himself at the easel

As he paints himself again and again and again.

 Watch here as he paints Georgette into flesh;

There, another woman stands on a beach

Before a sky of bathroom tiles,

Lowering a robe with one hand,

Cupping a pebbled nipple in the other

As she turns her pearled neck

To lick the curve of a shoulder.

Elsewhere, other breasts and pudenda

Glow through otherwise disembodied gowns

And, in portraits, replace eyes and mouths.

Then a candle ejaculates flame

And wax in a dark nest of eggs.

And, sooner or later,

The head on your shoulders

Will burst into a radiant sphere.

 Now, see here:

In the desert beyond,

Lies the alabaster tomb

Beneath a day burning down.

The train pulls steaming into the fireplace

And a lion sits sphinx-like on a bridge

Where the man in a winged tuxedo

Leans patiently over the parapet.

Outside the house, a lamp is lit under a tree,

Is reflected in a pool left by rain.

And upstairs windows shine out

As night rises under a bright blue sky.

Unreflected, clouds and shadows gather.

Inside, Madame’s coffin reclines elegantly

On the chaise longue by the candelabra,

The hem of her dress hanging like a shroud.

(2015) 

Another of the flurry of poems about painters that came in the late summer of 2015. Since finishing this one, I've realised that I must have imagined a Magritte picture of raining umbrellas as mentioned in the second verse, because I can find no trace of such an image anywhere. I am, however, leaving it in the poem - in the interests of Surrealism, you understand. The picture is on of several from the early 1930s which Magritte - with typical inscrutability - titled 'The Human Condition',

GUSTAVE DORE` (1832-83)

No commission daunted him:

No book too long, no poem too epic,

No fairy tale or nursery rhyme

Too slight for his illustration,

No metropolis too sprawling

For him to work on to canvas

And into wood, with no time to waste

Or marry or move away from mother.

Yet drawn to nomads like Quixote,

The Ancient Mariner and The Wandering Jew.

Oblivious to Impressionism,

His formalism disguising

The speed of that deft precision,

As quick and free as any other.

And no multitude too many:

Under his hand, heavens and hells grew:

Metaphorical, spiritual and geographical,

Out of the Bible, out of Dante

Out of Milton and out of London.

Yet still he would draw for the journals

And though he later worked with stone

As well as paint, drawing was his love:

What had made him le gamin de genie;

So prodigious, prolific and prompt,

The pictures teeming out of him,

Making their own monochrome multitude.

(2015)

 I taught Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (from which the above illustration comes) at A' Level and was also familiar with The London Of Gustave Dore` book - but these, of course, were merely the tip of the iceberg. This was another which came in a rush after waiting many years to be written.

NOCTURNE

    Here in the foreground,
    Black, silver and blue,
    Slates glint with the frost.
    Further back, churches
    Spire up in starlight.
    See the chimneys curl
    And the rooftops slant
    So sensually
    On those hard angles
    Of smokestacks and walls
    With dark curtains drawn,
    In the street below.
    Observe now, midground,
    The vague huddled figure
    In a dark trench-coat,
    Hurrying along
    The moonlit cobbles,
    Just past that street lamp.
    See it hesitate
    At some sharp corner.
    Does it move toward
    A familiar hearth,
    Out of the cold night;
    Or will it proceed,
    Further on outward
    Into the background
    Of a destiny
    Yet to crystallize,
    Black, silver and blue,
    In the icy dawn?

   (2012)

Another one that came very quickly after I’d been looking at a photograph of a Prague roofscape by the Czech photographer, Josef Sudek who I discovwered recently. The poem is by no means a literal description of the picture – it might just as easily recall scenes from the film noir, ‘ The Third Man’ – but it was the original point of departure.

The picture is one of a set of four that we bought from a photographer (not Sudek) who had a stall on the Charles Bridge in Prague several years ago. Interesting how all these elements come together...

1st JULY, 1916, THE SOMME

1st

JULY,

1916,

THE SOMME

After all the dramas
And documentaries,
After all the poetry
And the histories,
That summer morning
Never fails to appal:
The dull intelligence,
The wasted week
Of bombardment;
The Germans safe
In their rolling slopes
Despite the million shells;
Their wire uncut,
Their trenches intact;
The orders still standing
And sixty thousand fallen.
Men sent walking - walking –
Into a hell of fire and metal
And hundreds of thousands more men wasted
In the wasted months before the battle’s end,
When snow drew a shroud over the sludge,
In the dead of the wasted, wilderness winter.


(2012)

This was written in just a few minutes after we had watched BBC TV’s tremendously moving adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ WWI novel, ‘Birdsong’, the centerpiece of which is his setting of the Battle of the Somme.

In a negative and tragic sense, the history of mankind is the history of war – we just can’t seem to do without it. There is, however, something particularly compelling about the so called ‘Great War’. The Somme represents the top of the arc of the fighting halfway through the conflict. As far as I’m aware, there have never been so many military casualties on a single day of a battle in all history. When it was finally called off in November, 1916, well over a million British, French and German soldiers were dead. The allies had advanced barely five miles in those four and a half months…

The photograph shows the WWI memorial at Bradgate Park, Leics. This poem is my personal cenotaph.

THE ARROW OF TIME

It has given us a sporting start
But Time will run us down,
Like man-hunters honing their spears,
Measuring our breath in the rain-risen dawn
As we race past the arrow in the wilderness
And the certainty of death, towards life itself.

And all life ever here on populous planet Earth
Has lived in the twelve and a half miles girdle
Between Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench,
Riding the glorious freak of chance that made us
Light up the solar system’s dark, vast loneliness,
But as we circle the Sun and rush ever faster away,
The universe expands and we contract and end:
And no matter how we may bid Time to stay,
The lark will still ascend,
Ever higher, ever farther away.

And from white dwarf to red giant,
From the organism to the machine:
All will run down in Time
And be run down by Time,
And nothing can or has or will go
Beyond the endless flight of Time’s arrow.

(2012)

American Indians would sometimes sport with their captives, firing an arrow high and far on to the plain; where it fell would mark the point at which their prisoners were allowed to flee before the hunt would begin.

'The arrow of time' is a complex scientific concept which can be crudely summed up as ‘no turning back’. After the ‘Big Bang’ and the first sparks of creation everything eventually outlives its growth, declines into entropy and dies, even as the universe surges outwards towards infinity – and perhaps, as Buzz Lightyear adds, beyond…